Madagascar

Madagascar split from Africa and then from India so long ago that most of its plants and animals evolved nowhere else, lemurs and chameleons above all. A spine of granite highlands, terraced for rice, runs from end to end of the island and drops steeply to the east, where trade winds keep the rainforest wet. The west is drier, with deciduous forest and the baobabs that line the road near Morondava. At Bemaraha the limestone has weathered into razor-edged pinnacles called tsingy.

Humans arrived late. The first settlers seem to have sailed from Borneo across the Indian Ocean perhaps fifteen centuries ago, and Bantu-speaking Africans joined them, yet Malagasy speech is still closest to Ma’anyan, a language of southern Borneo. In the highlands the Merina kingdom expanded around 1800, and under Radama I missionaries put Malagasy into the Latin alphabet. France invaded in 1895, exiled Queen Ranavalona III, crushed a nationalist uprising in 1947 and ruled until independence in June 1960.

Families honour their dead in famadihana, when ancestors are lifted from the tomb, rewrapped in fresh silk shrouds and danced with before reburial. Local taboos called fady forbid certain foods or acts, and humped zebu cattle are counted as wealth. Rice comes with almost every meal, often beside romazava, a leafy beef stew, and rugby union, not football, is the national game. Farmers in the north-east hand-pollinate vanilla orchids for the island’s signature export, alongside cloves, nickel, cobalt and sapphires.